Understanding Alan Sillitoe offers a lucid appraisal of the life and works of the well-known contemporary British writer hailed by critics as the literary descendent of D.H. Lawrence. Known primarily for his novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Sillitoe has written more than 50 books over the last 40 years, including novels, plays, collections of short stories, poems, and travel pieces, as well as more than four hundred essays. In this comprehensive study of the major novels and short stories, Hanson reveals Sillitoe's artistic influences...

In Understanding Alan Bennett, Peter Wolfe conveys Bennett's originality, complexities of thought, and creative vigor while examining Bennett in his various roles as actor, director, playwright, and lyricist. As Wolfe illustrates, Bennett's success in his many spheres was no fluke. Bennett's theatrical eminence has been accompanied by awards and professional recognition. His play Single Spies won the Oliver Award as England's best comedy for 1989. The casts of his plays, starting with Forty Years On in 1968, have included such luminaries as Sir John Gielgud, Sir Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright,...

This is a discussion of the work of one of Britain's most highly regarded novelists and the winner of the 1998 Booker Prize. David Malcolm places Ian McEwan's work in the context of British literature's particular dynamism in the last decades of the 20th century. He also examines McEwan's relationship to feminism, concern with rationalism and science, use of moral perspective, and proclivity toward fragmentation.

Understanding Martin Amis is a comprehensive reader's guide to the novels, short stories, and nonfiction written by one of Britain's most highly acclaimed and controversial authors. Building on the first edition, published in 1995, James Diedrick draws on personal interviews, reviews, and criticism, as he maps the distinctive features of Martin Amis's imaginative landscape-the sociosexual satire of Money and Yellow Dog, the bold experimentation of Time's Arrow and Night Train, and the provocative blend of autobiography and cultural analysis in Experience and Koba the Dread. Diedrick...

Peter Wolfe's study of Penelope Fitzgerald's canon illuminates writings he characterizes as possessing unerring dramatic judgment, a friendly and fluid style, and lyrical and precise descriptive passages. In this survey of Fitzgerald's life and career, Wolfe explains how the British novelist brings resources of talent and craft, thought and feeling, courage and vulnerability, to the biographies and novels that have earned her renown. With readings of a broad range of her published works, including her final novel, The Blue Flower, Wolfe describes the unfolding of Fitzgerald's writing as a...

Understanding Julian Barnes surveys the career of an innovative British novelist who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize on three occasions. In this analysis of Barnes's distinctive qualities and of his place in the British literary establishment, Merritt Moseley suggests that Barnes's greatest achievement is his ability to resist summary and categorization by imagining each book in a dramatically original way. In evaluating Barnes's fiction, Moseley discusses the novelist's admiration for Gustave Flaubert, identifies his technical and thematic concerns, and explores the intrigue...